Some would argue (my dad for one) that all the research effort we put into marketing or communications could probably be better spent curing cancer or something foolish like that! But then we wouldn’t have nifty papers like this one from Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger (full disclosure: one of the supergeniuses went to Penn). His research suggests that subtle environmental cues can influence consumer choices. They begin their report by offering the example of Mars Bars, which saw an increase in sales after NASA landed the Pathfinder spacecraft on Mars on July 4, 1997. “Although the Mars Bar takes its name from the company founder and not from Earth’s neighboring planet, consumers apparently responded to news about the planet Mars by purchasing more Mars Bars,” the authors write. Crazy, right? Try putting a Mars landing expedition in next year’s line item budget.

With literally thousands of social net like objects proliferating who has the bandwidth to dip into a single one for more than a few minutes a day. Better yet, why should I spend my time sharing photos of my vacation in Puerto Rico when I could be sharing pet tips over at Fuzzster? The big hands are betting heavily right now on widget power as the real driver of attention and engagement. Two of the biggies, investment firms, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, paid $50 million for a 9.1% stake in Slide, a San Francisco- based company best known as the purveyor of entertainments like SuperPoke, which lets Facebook users “ninja kick” or “bodyslam” or “throw a pillow at” their friend Got that? The community is not about sharing fond memories with college buddies…it’s where’s that thingy that lets me throw virtual dog poop at them. Slide CEO Max Levchin dishes in a recent Fortune article about the power of widgets (that $50million stake implies a valuation of half a billion btw). “The metrics for success,” says Levchin, “are going to shift away from who can provide the most reach toward who is paid the most attention.”

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Super Genius LLC is a digital media and creative incubator that excels at bringing fresh, new thinking to existing strategy as well as blank-page strategic development. Our mission is to open up unique and exciting ways of connecting brands and consumers.

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." William Gibson